Fernando Rubio’s Everything By My Side, performed at the top floor of the National Gallery during the Singapore International Arts festival.
Photograph: Kong Chong Yew/Sifa 2016

Unlike the prevalent model in the UK, the US and Australia, where festivals occur in hyper-concentrated bursts of creative energy, Ong Keng Sen builds his festival with a slow burn.

Now in his third year as director of the Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa), Ong languorously stretches its 20 works out over a six-week period, itself proceeded by a “pre-festival of ideas” – The Open (also curated by Ong) – run over three weeks in June and July.

It’s an interesting model, which sacrifices intensity of engagement for a relationship that wants to linger. The overarching theme of the 2016 festival, which runs until 17 September, is “potentialities”, and you feel like the biggest potential Ong is reaching for is a chance to slowly infiltrate and shift the minds of his audiences over months.

In this, it is unashamedly a festival for the residents of Singapore. Visiting for a weekend, the vibrant city always calls. When a visitor’s day is spent with just one show, Sifa becomes more about the city itself than the art, the internationalism of the festival reflected through the internationalism of the city at every turn. It also means that any brief fling with the festival, such as mine, cannot help but create a lopsided understanding.

Sardono W Kusumo’s Expanded Cinema, which screens newly digitised Super 8 footage of his early performances inside theatres and in public spaces, and footage he shot himself in the 60s and 70s. Photograph: Sardono W Kusumo/Sifa 2016

Of the four works over the 2016 opening weekend, none were by Singaporean artists. There was no dance or work in public space presented, and the more artistically and politically challenging works – particularly in a country where art operates under censorship – were also yet to come.

The Indonesian artist Sardono W Kusumo is celebrated at this year’s Sifa and the first of three presentations of his work is Expanded Cinema, tucked away in a dark gallery on the bright and beautiful grounds of the Malay Heritage Centre. This installation screens newly digitised Super 8 footage: both his early performances inside theatres and in public spaces, and footage he shot himself, throughout the world but always returning to Indonesia, in the 60s and 70s.

These silent films – proudly wearing the crackling and degradation of the film stock – play alongside Kusumo’s 2016 feature-length experimental film, Raden Saleh After 200 Years. On three screens a young Kusumo dances on top of ruins; a child smiles and plays for the camera; Indonesian boys dance in a circle. Seemingly looking down at them is Kusumo of today: a stately figure in long hair and a crisp beard, standing on the streets of Paris.

Hamlet | Collage by Robert Lepage, in which the actor Yevgeny Mironov singlehandedly takes on all of the roles in Hamlet in a spinning cube. Photograph: Sergey Petrov/Sifa 2016

There is a sheering of the timeline: we see only Kusumo as a young and inquisitive dancer in his 20s, and as a leading contemporary artist of today. But, despite the gap, together they paint a picture of a man whose art has consistently explored the intersection of traditional Javanese dance with contemporary practice, and whose energy and rigour shows no signs of slowing down.

The retrospective of Kusumo’s work is a significant artistic investment by the festival as is Ong’s commitment to reaching beyond the current international festival touring circuit. While Robert Lepage is a festival staple, rather than bringing to Sifa one of his two current widely touring works, Needles and Opium or 887, Ong has instead brought his first Russian production, Hamlet | Collage, to be performed outside of Russia for the first time.

As with his 1991 work Needles and Opium, Hamlet | Collage takes place in a cube seemingly suspended above the stage. The work is at its most gratifying when Lepage’s direction leans into the hypnotism of Carl Fillion’s set: a single space creating infinite worlds, as a man plays with a dizzying number of characters.

The cube spins, projections carefully tracked onto its surface, set pieces folding in and out, as Yevgeny Mironov singlehandedly takes on all of the roles in Hamlet. Bookended with scenes set inside a mental hospital, Lepage suggests this telling is all in a man’s mind.

Perhaps that is explanation enough for the seeming clash of aesthetics through the piece but the framing device fails to maintain any potency through the work: Mironov’s magnetising performance is enough of an artistic intervention alone.

From the distillation of Hamlet told through one body, Ahmed El Attar’s The Last Supper swarms a chaotic Egyptian extended family together at a family dinner.

At times it feels six or seven plays are happening simultaneously: some spoken, others told through clicked fingers, silent gestures, or withering glances. It makes it a challenging work to experience through surtitles – follow the details of a conversation here, the details of an interaction there are lost.

The cast of Ahmed El Attar’s The Last Supper, which exposes an unseen side of Egypt’s Arab spring. Photograph: Mostafa Abdel Aly/Sifa 2016

But El Attar builds his work to explode in cacophony: for us non-Arabic speakers, the explosion just comes sooner.

For many in the Sifa audience, El Attar exposes an unseen side of Egypt’s Arab spring. Instead of the chaos on the streets, we see an upper-class family who wish only that this distraction will shortly be over. Disguised as a comedy, the humour distracts from the seeping darkness and final punch of the work’s dissection of privilege in a story of racism, classism, capitalism, sexism and the pull towards and rally against the superpower of the United States. If the full complexity of El Attar’s work can’t be understood through translation, his rallying call stands clear.

The quietest intervention by the festival on the opening weekend is Fernando Rubio’s Everything By My Side. Although typically performed by actors of the country where the work is being staged, here – in a nod to Ong’s consistent international focus – one Singaporean actor is joined by a woman from each of the nine previous countries that presented it. Often performed in exposed public places – Canary Wharf, Hudson Park – at Sifa, the work is sequestered away on the top floor of the National Gallery: a necessary cove from Singapore’s thick heat.

It is hard not to think a dimension of the work is lost in its removal from public eyes. But, in a country so filled with energy – for an outsider, a seemingly unrelenting hustle – perhaps this is the space most acutely needed for it.

We are faced with a quiet room, 10 welcoming beds, and 10 women with 10 accents – a reflection of the hundreds of accents that buzz around the city. The words they speak almost don’t matter. All there is is their sweet murmur, their intensity of eye contact, the folding of hair behind a new found partner’s eye and a moment of silent, private, breath.

One of the most intriguing and exciting aspects of Ong’s programming is his commitment to exposing his audiences to multiple works from single artists: but this means the 10-minute performance of Everything By My Side feels incomplete without seeing its counterpart in Rubio’s Time Between Us, a 108-hour performance that will take part in a small wooden house built in the centre of bustling Marina Bay Sands. And what does it mean to see Kusumo’s archival video dance projects from the 60s and 70s without being able to watch his latest dance work, Black Sun, commissioned by Sifa?

A weekend at Sifa brings to Singapore’s arts world a new light on the conversations between some of the world’s leading contemporary voices in performance. But, by design, merely dipping into it doesn’t do it justice: this is a festival designed to be experienced as curation quietly stitching its way through the fabric of the city. Ong has designed a festival to be savoured: it is only as a whole, one feels, that its potential can be realised.